Doesn’t matter much. @sweatystartup has an awesome list of service industries on his website that will get the job done.
This is a very long thread. @SamtLeslie asked to give the playbook for service companies so here it is. Follow it and you’ll get to 5M+ in a few years.
This is pure operations playbook.
No leadership, financial or HR discussion. Enjoy.
Doesn’t matter much. @sweatystartup has an awesome list of service industries on his website that will get the job done.
If you are under 3M and in multiple trades you’re doing it wrong. I was there and it was a mess.
Businesses under 3M don’t have good system, managers, effective onboarding, training, hiring practices, or pricing methods. If you did then you’d be bigger.
Multiple trades doubles that mess. Get your first business figured out then work on another.
I would recommend earliest 4M to add a second trade, if at all. Any earlier you’re splitting focus and treading water.
Focus Focus Focus.
If you’re using anything besides Servicetitan then please stop and go get Servicetitan. No other software even close to their capabilities.
It is 50% more expensive than other programs on the market while making you 100% better than any competitor not using it.
Radio, billboards, tv and postcards are cool and all but I see them as “density marketing”. Do it when you’re rolling at 4M.
Brand building is cool but your two truck brand doesn’t have the bandwidth. Go build your company, a culture and then drive brand.
Up to 4M blow your internet presence up. Aim for a thousand google reviews. Spend money on PPC and SEO. Pick up your phone when it rings. I use Scorpion and highly recommend.
I’ve seen people double marketing budget without enough CSRs in place to pickup. 🤔
Price yourself at a premium and use flat rate. I can honestly say I have no idea what my competitors charge.
I can also honestly say that their pricing is irrelevant to my pricing.
I eat their lunch all day long because we provide awesome service, our customers love us, we have hundreds of 5 star reviews and oh yeah - we pick up the phone.
Raise them annually.
Pay your techs a lot. If you aren’t actively looking for a path to get your techs earning a lot then you’ll lose good techs.
Here’s the deal. Techs can make a lot. They know they can make a lot. Your competitors advertise that they pay techs a lot.
They’ll either do it by working for you, a competitor or themselves.
Lots of ways to get here. I recommend an hourly + incentive approach. We regularly have techs topping $50/hour effective rate and if we didn’t we would lose them.
Becoming a manager is not a promotion. I see a lot of well meaning owners promoting their “best tech” to service/op manager. I am going to make an extreme statement and say that I have NEVER seen this be effective.
Not only did you just lose your best tech but you also hired someone who has probably never managed anyone to be your go-to manager.
This is too important of a position to promote someone who needs taught. Take your business seriously and hire an actual manager.
It doesn’t make sense, I don’t know why I did it and certainly don’t know why people smarter than me do it.
Go find a business system and follow it. There are a lot of them out there and it’s not just franchises.
It will shave years off your growth plan because it puts best practices into your biz early.
Find out your industry KPIs. This can be done through a business system, friends you know in the industry or asking Twitter.
If you don’t know what to aim for you’ll never hit it. I’ve SMB owners who dont know their avg ticket, GM or how they compare to industry.
Around 10 vehicles look into commercial leasing. It makes growth dramatically easier.
I can email our fleet company and have a vehicle on my lot, shelved, wrapped in two weeks. (Soon they’ll do inventory too!). You’re not in the car business.
Tackle it early. It’s a pain in the ass later. I recommend inventorying trucks and investing in a software to track it. Lock the room, track those costs.
Kill it if you can. You shouldn’t be in the inventory business.
Do it. Plus 401k and whatever else. Hard to grow a company if you don’t keep good people.
Hard to keep good people if you don’t give them a good place to work and make them not stress about their personal life.
Go buy a company doing 500k - 1M revenue and is super inefficient. More inefficient the better. Resist the urge to start something. You’ll spend a few years for no reason.
Pay whatever. I’m all about value but you’ll grow so fast it’s less relevant.
Hire a call center to handle overflow and hire a new CSR, maybe 2. I can almost guarantee the one that came with the biz is grumpy and not a good CSR. That phone needs answered no matter what and customers need to love that voice.
Put company on Servicetitan.
No. Housecall pro, jobber or any other discount CRM is not the same.
Yes. It is worth the price difference.
Yes. This decision is important and will hold you back later.
6% of revenue is a good start.
More from Startup
I just gave a talk to the W2021 YC batch. It's my favorite startup audience to talk to. Here are some of the highlights:
Finding product market fit is the critical thing to do in a startup.
Everything else: demo day, what investors you get, how much you raise, what press covers you -- it is all window dressing.
Many founders don’t want to talk to their customers because it makes them vulnerable, because it's hard work, because it's scary. Creating a tight feedback loop with customers is the one thing that will help you discover PMF.
If a customer isn't one of your cofounders, try to create a customer panel that allows as tight of a loop as possible. Call them daily. Put them in your Slack.
My Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear has a great analogy on PMF here: it's like rolling a boulder downhill.
Finding product market fit is the critical thing to do in a startup.
Everything else: demo day, what investors you get, how much you raise, what press covers you -- it is all window dressing.
Many founders don’t want to talk to their customers because it makes them vulnerable, because it's hard work, because it's scary. Creating a tight feedback loop with customers is the one thing that will help you discover PMF.
If a customer isn't one of your cofounders, try to create a customer panel that allows as tight of a loop as possible. Call them daily. Put them in your Slack.
My Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear has a great analogy on PMF here: it's like rolling a boulder downhill.
1/ What is \u201cproduct/market fit\u201d? I\u2019m not sure I can give you a definition. But maybe I can share what the subjective difference is in how it feels when you have it and when you don\u2019t. Founding a startup is deciding to take on the burden of Sisyphus: pushing a boulder up a hill.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) July 27, 2019
16 Excellent websites I discovered in 2022 ( that are extremely useful ) :
1. Scribe How
Screen recording extension that instantly converts any process into a guide.
93% less time spent documenting and sharing processes
🔗 https://t.co/dk5fk7zxmz
2. Writesonic
Your writing AI assistant.
The only AI writer in the world that can help you write SEO-optimized, long-form (up to 1500 words) blog posts, and articles in 15 seconds.
Explore Chatsonic - Like ChatGPT but with superpowers.
🔗 https://t.co/j8GX4jn07Q
3. Dotcomkings
Free resources to find gigs, side hustles, and platforms that can help you start a small business and make money online.
🔗 https://t.co/ceKDtabBBE
4. Quillbot
Using cutting-edge AI, QuillBot's paraphrasing tool assists millions of people in rewriting and improving any sentence, paragraph, or article.
🔗 https://t.co/MlKEgJYSvu
1. Scribe How
Screen recording extension that instantly converts any process into a guide.
93% less time spent documenting and sharing processes
🔗 https://t.co/dk5fk7zxmz
2. Writesonic
Your writing AI assistant.
The only AI writer in the world that can help you write SEO-optimized, long-form (up to 1500 words) blog posts, and articles in 15 seconds.
Explore Chatsonic - Like ChatGPT but with superpowers.
🔗 https://t.co/j8GX4jn07Q
3. Dotcomkings
Free resources to find gigs, side hustles, and platforms that can help you start a small business and make money online.
🔗 https://t.co/ceKDtabBBE
4. Quillbot
Using cutting-edge AI, QuillBot's paraphrasing tool assists millions of people in rewriting and improving any sentence, paragraph, or article.
🔗 https://t.co/MlKEgJYSvu
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The first area to focus on is diversity. This has become a dogma in the tech world, and despite the fact that tech is one of the most meritocratic industries in the world, there are constant efforts to promote diversity at the expense of fairness, merit and competency. Examples:
USC's Interactive Media & Games Division cancels all-star panel that included top-tier game developers who were invited to share their experiences with students. Why? Because there were no women on the
ElectronConf is a conf which chooses presenters based on blind auditions; the identity, gender, and race of the speaker is not known to the selection team. The results of that merit-based approach was an all-male panel. So they cancelled the conference.
Apple's head of diversity (a black woman) got in trouble for promoting a vision of diversity that is at odds with contemporary progressive dogma. (She left the company shortly after this
Also in the name of diversity, there is unabashed discrimination against men (especially white men) in tech, in both hiring policies and in other arenas. One such example is this, a developer workshop that specifically excluded men: https://t.co/N0SkH4hR35
USC's Interactive Media & Games Division cancels all-star panel that included top-tier game developers who were invited to share their experiences with students. Why? Because there were no women on the
ElectronConf is a conf which chooses presenters based on blind auditions; the identity, gender, and race of the speaker is not known to the selection team. The results of that merit-based approach was an all-male panel. So they cancelled the conference.
Apple's head of diversity (a black woman) got in trouble for promoting a vision of diversity that is at odds with contemporary progressive dogma. (She left the company shortly after this
Also in the name of diversity, there is unabashed discrimination against men (especially white men) in tech, in both hiring policies and in other arenas. One such example is this, a developer workshop that specifically excluded men: https://t.co/N0SkH4hR35